Plastic to Oil - Great Technology

This is a discussion on Plastic to Oil - Great Technology within the Off Topic & Humor Discussion forums, part of the The Back Porch category; This is some pretty awesome technology. There should be one of these in every house.
http://www.flixxy.com/convert-plastic-to-oil.htm...

There are tons of these technologies out there. None have been proven past the research or demo plant stage. You can even "burn" garbage and turn it into diesel or other fuels. Most work off of catalytic depolymerization or with engineered microbes. So far has been tough to scale up to commercial plants. Canada has one in Edmonton limping along I think and there are two in design stage in Florida. Few more years to wait.

Well, even if not for your $10k engine, why not just for the purpose of recycling all that plastic to keep the land fills from filling up with the stuff. Use the oil from it to heat homes, or burn it off some other way. I can see where some use could be made of it.

Exactly. Don't even get me started with my experiences with ethanol (another great idea).

Oh boy, you hit a nerve with that one. I'm all for corn farmers getting a good buck for their crop, but corn-to-ethanol only makes economic sense if you don't have any other means to fill the tanks on gasoline-powerered vehicles. Lifecycle energy costs for ethanol exceed that of gasoline refined from crude oil. And then there's that other next great idea, electric cars... which are as far from "green" as yellow is.

Im not saying put plastic in the earth,just burn it.Burn it for fun,or use it for some stinky smelling heat.

Now,we know you cant really eat the grain used for ethanol( well,i guess you could eat anything).But the land thats being used for growing crap ethanol should be used for real food.I say print some more money and give them a grant for donating food to the poor.

And oh lord,electric cars.A ton of bs.The batteries take so much frickin energy and pollution and slave mining to produce.

Corn ethanol requirements, farm subsidies, all the products of agricultural lobby. The thing is that farm subsidies donít help the small farmers like most politicos tell you they do, they help out the large corporations. So us requiring corn ethanol is a foolish thing also because it muscles out investments for cellulose ethanol like is used in Brazil and other countries. Returning plastic to oil sounds great if we can move it to a commercial level however that sounds like itís still a bit of R&D away. Do car engines really cost 10,000$? Wow that makes the subway fare hike sound cheep.

It is makes sense- plastic is made from oil in the first place. They fail to mention how much electricity (read energy) is used to heat and convert the plastic back to oil. I highly doubt this process actually has any sort of net gain of useful energy.

You can make diamonds from peanut butter. No one ever thought that was all that good of an idea...

Corn ethanol requirements, farm subsidies, all the products of agricultural lobby. The thing is that farm subsidies don’t help the small farmers like most politicos tell you they do, they help out the large corporations. So us requiring corn ethanol is a foolish thing also because it muscles out investments for cellulose ethanol like is used in Brazil and other countries. Returning plastic to oil sounds great if we can move it to a commercial level however that sounds like it’s still a bit of R&D away. Do car engines really cost 10,000$? Wow that makes the subway fare hike sound cheep.

Alex, I don't think Brazil is using cellulose derived ethanol on any large scale. (Could be wrong though.) I think they are using cane sugar as the feed stock. The "holy grail" of recyclable energy is to break down cellulose and ferment the sugars. While we hear about "big successes" from time to time, somehow nothing much ever comes to it. It takes a lot of energy (heat and acid hydrolysis) to convert cellulose to sugar. IT takes lots of expensive enzymes to do it without acid hydrolysis. And, it usually requires some fairly pure form of cellulose because non-cellulosic plant matter tends to gum up the works and can't be hydrolyzed. Maybe you can make it fly from newsprint or cotton, but grass (not the MJ kind) and old dead oak limbs won't cut it..

Forty years ago I worked for a small start up that wanted to ferment the cellulose present in high amounts in soy bean meal. They wanted to extract the protein and ferment the rest to produce yeast, which would have raised the total protein content from each pound of soy bean meal.

While I haven't followed this very carefully for many many years, I seriously doubt that anyone is making much ethanol commercially from cellulose digestion and fermentation.

Ethanol has other problems, even when it isn't made from stuff that people and animals use. I am convinced that my truck get at least 5-10% poorer mileage when it is run on a 10% ethanol blend.

I'd love for ethanol to be real and beneficial as a domestic energy source, but I'm really really really skeptical.

Your right I miss spoke. I probably wanted to say something else, maybe about switch grass, that the new hot thing for cellulose ethanol. I should read my messages more before I send them. dam brain farts

My understanding is that ethanol will never be more than a small percentage additive as there is not enough farm land on the entire planet to meet the needs of the U.S. alone. Plastic is made from oil, but isn't more chemical compounds used also? What happens to them when you reverse the process? Also, if this device is made bigger, like say refinery size, could it be solar powered? Didn't I hear decades ago that there had been a nuclear powered furnace that pretty much used garbage as a fuel, made electricty, and produced very little smog or ash?
BTW, if Mobile 1 is synthetic oil, can gas be made from synthetic oil? And why can't generators be put on the axles of cars to recharge electric cars?